A variety of cheeses, meats, hot dogs and other processed meats and food products are sold in packages formed from flexible thermoplastic materials. These packages have generally been formed by placing two sheets of thermoplastic material in face to face contact and sealing the periphery of the two sheets to form a product cavity. In order to insure the freshness and shelf-life or freezer-life of such foods, it is well known in the art to evacuate and hermetically seal the content storage area of such packages. However, when the hermetic seal is initially broken to gain access to the contents, it is quite often the case that the entire contents of the package are not utilized or consumed at once. It is difficult to reclose the package and preserve the contents in a fresh state for storage in a refrigerator for later consumption, which often requires the consumer to completely repackage the contents in another container. To overcome this problem, there have been many prior art package configurations which offer means of opening and resealing the package to preserve freshness.
Some prior art packages utilize what is commonly referred to as closure strips on each of the two inner surfaces of the thermoplastic packaging material. The closure strips are generally thermoplastic beads, where the beads have an interlocking profile to securely seal and reseal the contents of the package.
However, the prior art food packaging products encounter the problem that it is difficult to initially open the package because the film sheets which make up the package often do not slide very easily against each other to provide one exposed film edge to grasp. It therefore becomes difficult to break the hermetic seal and gain access to the food product. Food packages with recloseable interlocking beads or zipper strips, as well as those with tamper-evident features, still require the consumer to digitally manipulate the sheets of material forming the package and separately grasp each sheet of material in order to initially separate the interlocking beads of the closure strip or to separate the two sheets of hermetically sealed thermoplastic material to gain access to the contents. This separation of the thermoplastic material is made difficult by the face-to-face configuration of the two sheets as well as the similarity in texture and visual characteristics of the two sheets. If the digital manipulation required to separate the two sheets of thermoplastic material is too tedious, consumers may become frustrated with the packaging and switch to products sold in packages which may not be hermetically sealed but are more easily opened.